


Water and Wolfsbane

by PhantomEngineer



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Retcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-04-13 16:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14116761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhantomEngineer/pseuds/PhantomEngineer
Summary: Sorting through her stuff, Lily finds a box of old treasures under her bed, shoved away and forgotten. It takes her on a trip down memory lane, back to when she was a child playing games of make believe and magic with Severus. Because Hogwarts couldn’t have been anything more than the fantasy of two precocious little children, could it? After all, everyone knows magic isn’t real… Right…?(Some inspiration is drawn from Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones)





	1. Water

Lily opened the box with a sigh. She’d been meaning to do this for ages, going on years. She always put it off though. No matter how much she knew she ought to do it, the prospect of clearing out her old things stored in the various boxes under her bed promised to be a long, boring process. She’d had this one since secondary school, she imagined. She’d just shoved it under her bed when she moved into her flat after university and given it no further consideration. She’d never been back to Cokeworth once her parents had died, and she’d long since lost contact with Petunia. In many ways it was a shame. One day she’d write her sister a letter, she promised herself once again. She thought that a lot now. They’d both been young. Whatever had it been that they’d argued about so much, she wondered. Did she even have Petunia’s address or had she moved, that would be a question that she’d have to face too. Maybe after a trip down memory lane and her teenage years at Cokeworth Comprehensive she might feel like trying to find some way of contacting her sister. It must be close to twenty years since they’d last spoken.

Sad, in a way. She was thirty-eight, and almost entirely alone. She had friends, but none of them close. People she knew from work, people she would go for the occasional drink with, but no one she would consider to be a true friend. No family. She didn’t even have any pets. At least she enjoyed her research, even if the topic of the folk tales of ancient English was too obscure for most. She loved pouring over old books about magic, legends about dragons and faerie queens, but some of it could be quite dry. It could be a part of the reason she was still single.

She felt that the time was right to finally go through it though, a task delayed over the years suddenly seeming like a pressing necessity that day, an obligation she couldn’t quite shake. As if there was a deadline drawing near, though she knew that was just her being silly. It was just chance that she felt the sudden desire to finally get it over with, sort through the old junk she was still clinging on to, throw most of it away no doubt and then get on with the rest of her life without that albatross hanging round her neck. A ghostly reminder of her childhood doing nothing but lurking around at the edge of her consciousness, taking up physical space that could be put to better use than storing an eternally ignored cardboard box gathering dust. As if she should put those ghosts to rest, finally allow them to settle into their graves. Or maybe give them the acknowledgement they deserved, even coax a few shadows back to life. There might be a note about where Petunia lived, or at least had once lived, buried somewhere amongst the ancient relics. 

Looking at the contents of the box, the first thing she noticed was a photograph of a castle. It seemed to almost extend outward from the picture, as if it had more dimensions than could be held by the shiny paper. It stood proud against the stark, dramatic scenery behind it, tall stone towers reaching for the heavens. The detail was so rich that the clouds almost seemed to be moving across the sky. Hogwarts, she thought nostalgically. Severus had talked of a magical castle called Hogwarts when they were children.

Strange, she thought, it had been a long time since she thought of Severus. Whatever had happened to him, did he ever make it out of Cokeworth? In some ways Lily wished she knew the answers to those questions. They had drifted apart at school, as children do. She paused at that, looking again at the castle. They hadn’t really, though, had they? They’d argued, by a lake. She frowned, casting her mind back over the years. There was no lake anywhere near Cokeworth Comprehensive. There was no lake near Cokeworth, so why did she remember a lake? She shook her head. Memories were strange, she was probably getting it mixed up with something else. She and Severus had drifted apart and finally argued. Sad, but perfectly normal.

She wondered idly if it was his excited fantasies that had drawn her initially to folklore, the subject she had ended up devoting her life to. In a way it was interesting that their childhood stories of make-believe had never been ones of knights defeating dragons but rather of spells and potions, the intricate, almost mundane wonders of magic.

It really was a magnificent photograph, Lily marvelled. Maybe she should hang it on her wall, rather than leaving it shoved away inside a box of memories. It seemed like a shame to throw it out, that was for sure, and might make for some nice decoration in her little flat. She had never really been one for decorating much with nice pictures or ornaments, but seeing as she had such a good picture maybe she should considering getting it framed. If she had people round they might comment on it, but she never did. 

She held it in her hands, holding it up to try to imagine it on her wall. She’d made up with Severus later, a faint trickle of a memory reminded her. Outside his parents’ house in Spinner’s End, they’d buried the hatchet and returned to being friends. Lily dropped the photograph onto her bed. It lay there, a stark contrast to the blue roses on her duvet cover. If she’d made up with Severus, why had they fallen out of contact so abruptly? It was true that he’d always been an odd boy, talking of magic and Hogwarts, but she had liked him. She’d been a bit of an odd one out at school too. He’d been clever though, good at pretty much all their subjects and so very studious. Surely he’d gone on to university? They must have gone to different universities and drifted apart that way, she reasoned. Maybe she should look him up too, and write to him. It was about as likely as her getting back in contact with Petunia, after all. She knew that she was the kind of person who did just drift out of contact with people, letting friends become people she hadn’t communicated with in years, but she hadn’t thought Severus was like that. He had been intense in his way, but also so strong-minded. If they had argued then she could see him cutting her off, never forgiving her and moving on, and yet at the same time that seemed wrong somehow. They had been best friends, once upon a time. She couldn’t really recall either of them being particularly close to anyone else in their year, all the other faces seemed to blend into one, a mass of teenagers in the ugly but practical Cokeworth Comprehensive school uniform. 

She returned her attention to the contents of the box once more, and drew out a rough wooden stick. She laughed in delight. It must be a wand, lovingly stored all those years. It almost looked like it had been professionally carved, but Lily knew that couldn’t be true. It must be a relic from the games she had played with Severus, the fantasy games where he was a wizard and she was a witch. They went to a school called Hogwarts, which was a castle, where they learned magic. They’d played that game for far too long, she thought with a certain amount of indulgent affection for her younger self. They must have kept it up until they were in their late teens. No wonder Petunia had despaired of them. Raising it, she pointed it with a flourish, as if pretending to perform a spell. She winced, dropping the stick. Her head hurt, a sharp jagged pain shooting through her brain leaving a dull ache in its stead. The wand clattered to the floor.

She stayed curled up on her bed for a while, almost breathless at the pain wriggling its way around her skull. When she did look up, she left the wand where it was for the time being. She glanced at the box once more. On the top of the assorted paraphernalia was her Hogwarts letter. She remembered that, she thought with a pained smile. It had been a nice little fantasy. It was almost cute that she and Severus had been so committed to their game of make-believe that they’d gone as far as writing themselves letters inviting them to their fictional school. She was impressed with the penmanship, it was far better than she recalled her eleven year old self from writing. No wonder it had almost convinced her parents for a moment. Of course, they’d gone to Cokeworth Comprehensive rather than a magical castle, but it had been a nice day dream.

She picked up the letter, and really was impressed with the effort that must have gone into creating it. Maybe Severus had written it, she wondered. He did have rather pretty writing, in as much as she could recall. But the words seemed fairly advanced for two eleven year olds, and the attention to detail was really quite astounding. It had even been addressed to her bedroom, which made her chuckle. They had been clever kids, but even so the style of the letter was incredibly mature. She couldn’t remember writing it, though. She remembered buying the textbooks in Diagon Alley and being measured for her robes, though. She froze, startled. 

She remembered Cokeworth Comprehensive, sitting next to Severus in maths class. She remembered sitting next to Severus in Potions at Hogwarts too. In that moment, she felt a calm confusion as her memories seemed to split in two, the partition almost growing out of the seed that had been planted by the searing pain from moments ago. The memories she’d spent the last few years knowing and these new memories that seemed to have been hidden all this time. As she compared them, almost side by side, she felt a chill settle in the pit of her stomach. The memories of Hogwarts seemed to be the sharper of the two, the one with the most realistic clarity. Had she ever even been to Cokeworth Comprehensive? For a moment it seemed like the way she recalled stories she had read, sketches created in her mind’s eye, as if she had drawn the pictures of a life based off what she had been told. Vague faces with details lacking, the backgrounds often ignored in favour of the points that were plot-relevant, a school full of people she had never actually met.

She wished suddenly that she had kept in contact with either Petunia or Severus, as a phone call to either of them would no doubt put this ridiculous fantasy to rest, a quick chat to remind herself of their shared memories, undoubtably mundane. Petunia had been a couple of years ahead of her at school, they’d talked about their shared teachers. But Petunia hadn’t been at Hogwarts, that had been just her and Severus. Had they excluded her from their game, she wondered, or had she thought them childish? Or were they gifted with magic, and Petunia had just been normal… Muggles didn’t go to Hogwarts, hadn’t Severus told her that…?

She tried to think back, back to when it had all started. Back to when she first met Severus. When was that, she wondered, how was it that they first met? She strained at her memory, which seemed now so erratic and unreliable, trying to find that moment when it had begun. Hazily, something floated into her mind. A flower. A flower, floating in the air. Slowly drifting, from him to her. He’d done that to show her he wasn’t lying, that magic was real. It seemed so unlikely though, she thought as the splitting pain returned to her head. Wincing, she curled up on her bed again, waiting miserably for the agony to pass.

Wasn’t that after all one of the reasons she and Petunia had argued, the fact that she and Severus had kept up their childish games of make believe far longer than Petunia had considered to be respectable. Her parents had indulged them, which she knew had annoyed Petunia. It had been harmless, surely… Severus’s father had hated anything to do with magic, but his mother… Severus had once said she was a witch, she remembered as much, but Eileen had never to her knowledge actually indulged in their little game. None of those thoughts helped with her headache, or with the confusion she was feeling. Now, as an adult, she felt almost as if it wasn’t that Tobias had hated magic, but that he was afraid of it. And why, if Eileen had been a witch, had she hidden herself away in mundane poverty, that was a question that Lily felt should have destroyed any lingering doubt about it having been just a silly story two children had made up, but in reality it made her more certain that there was something she was missing. 

She’d been afraid of Eileen, she could remember that clearly, the sharp memory cutting through the echoing pain. Eileen had been odd and skittish, just like Severus. A strange woman with her strange child. Lily hadn’t seen her much, though. Hogwarts had been a boarding school. They’d had to take the train, all the way from London. For a moment she could see the platform clearly, but that didn’t prove anything. She had after all been to plenty of train stations all over the country, including London. But she couldn’t leave it alone, the strange sensations of the distorted memories clamouring and clashing with each other filling her senses. They’d been in different Houses at Hogwarts. That was such a stupid detail. Surely, if they’d invented the whole thing, they wouldn’t have decided on something like that, they would have been together. Especially seeing as Gryffindor and Slytherin had been on such bad terms. Best friends would never willingly chose to be in rival Houses that actively hated each other.

She played with her hair, leaning back against the wall, her fingers massaging her scalp absentmindedly. Houses. All schools had houses, that was perfectly normal. Arbitrarily assigned by their teacher with little real meaning, and yet they had been so crucially important at Hogwarts, almost as if they were the backbone of the wizarding world. She could barely remember what house she’d been in at Cokeworth Comprehensive, let alone which one Severus had been in. It had simply not mattered to them, just another irrelevance of their school life. At Hogwarts a hat had decided, a decision that had affected every possible aspect of their lives as well as their futures. A magical Sorting Hat that read their minds. Lily wanted to dismiss it as clearly a silly idea invented by excitable young children, but she could almost feel the memory of the Hat falling down over her eyes as clearly as she could feel her own fingers combing through her hair. She could vaguely remember the strange voice that had spoken directly into her mind before directing her towards Gryffindor, a moment that set the path of her life, just as it had done to Severus when he was allocated Slytherin. Despite that, they’d remained friends. It felt at times like all the forces in the universe were trying to tear them apart, but Lily had clung on fiercely, refusing to give in.

Just like how Janet had held on to Tam Lin. She had always loved that song, and through that the legend that lay behind it. There was something about Janet’s strength and resolve that she’d always admired. The way she’d done what she believed in, bravely and sincerely, no matter what she maybe would have been expected to do. She remembered listening to it in the tatty old kitchen of the house in Spinner’s End, the gramophone nowhere near as good as the one that was in her parent’s house, but in many ways that didn’t matter. Severus had loved Tam Lin too, just as he’d loved all those old ballads and poetry. They’d easily lost themselves in the ancient world of promises and faerie queens. She had never known for sure how Eileen or Tobias felt, though the record was theirs so she could only assume that they liked it. Her parents rarely listened to that style of music, folk songs recounting long forgotten traditions. Eileen had often looked like there was something she wanted to say, words and thoughts that that song in particular had drawn forth, only they were never enunciated, never released. Tobias always seemed as if he were lost in thought, as if the story of Tam Lin brought back memories that consumed him.

She turned her attention back to the box, not sure if she really wanted to be thinking such confused and strange thoughts of the past. She felt as if the world was unreal, reality warping as she thought, an uncomfortable sensation. Searching for something concrete to stabilise the world inside her head as much as her perception of the world around her, she reached her fingers back in and they grazed the cover of a worn old book. It was battered, the spine creased and fraying, as if it had been read so many times it was on the verge of falling to pieces. She could remember reading poetry as a teenager, pouring over it and connecting to the emotions contained within those well-crafted lines. Old poetry, old folk tales, those things had always been a passion of hers. It was why she had chosen to spend so much of her adult life examining it, researching and publishing, trying to impart her love and fascination to the students who took her classes. 

It had been Tobias who gave her the book of poetry, she remembered. It would have made sense for it to have been a birthday present or something, but it hadn’t been. He had given it to her during the summer holidays. It had been midsummer, she remembered that. Birthday presents couldn’t have been given in person while she was at Hogwarts, as it was a boarding school and her birthday fell during term time. It was a strange thought, overruling the memories of her teenage birthdays spent with family which now seemed strangely faded, as if the scenes she could recall had been deliberately staged by bad actors who struggled to get their stage directions and costumes right. A girl in an ill-fitting red wig, her gestures a poor imitation of Lily’s movements, going through the motions.

He had given it to her, secretively. That was strange, in a way. It was only a book, and everyone knew she liked poetry. She flicked through it, thoughtfully. There was Tam Lin, the title underlined in soft pencil. For a moment she remembered having done so, then she remembered a conflicting memory of how the book had already had that mark when she first opened it. Thomas the Rhymer too was underlined, and they were starred in the contents page, the same soft pencil. She had never been in the habit of marking her books, hating to mar the beautiful crisp pages with her own scrawl. Severus had been different, covering all his textbooks in all sorts of complicated notes that reflected his inner thoughts. He had got it from his father, she had realised. Tobias had always made little notes in the margins of the books he read, the books he loved despite being nothing more than a common manual labourer. He had almost hinted once, at a previous existence that had revolved around something different, something almost lyrical, but it was as if it had been a past life belonging to someone else. It didn’t fit with the results, the life Eileen and Tobias led in the small house in Spinner’s End.

It was the kind of thing that made her think of theories regarding the existence of a multiverse, where there were all kinds of intersecting universes existing alongside each other. As if maybe Tobias and Eileen had been from an alternative dimension, had had a different life and different history until everything shifted and they had ended up a manual labourer and a housewife in a run down house. She knew it was a silly thing to consider, the sort of artistic misunderstanding of complex theoretical physics that someone who had spent her life devoted to the study of old myths and magic might harbour. She knew nothing of physics, though she vaguely remembered that she had been good at it at school. Just like Severus. They had both been good at pretty much everything, two clever children full of creativity and ideas. Full of passion and bright futures. Her memories were making her think of multiple universes again, of wondering if two worlds ran parallel and she was caught in between them. She remembered her time with Severus in Cokeworth Comprehensive, just as she remembered her time with Severus at Hogwarts. Logically, she knew magic didn’t exist. And yet, her memories seemed so clear, so real and so convincing. 

Her book of poetry hadn’t been new when Tobias had given it to her, she vaguely remembered. Most of what the Snapes had owned had been second hand, well worn or so old it almost belonged in a museum. Maybe, she wondered, that was why Tobias had given it to her on midsummer’s eve rather than her birthday. It wasn’t a present as such, as a book he had owned. Or maybe something he had come across and thought of her, in a charity shop or hidden away in their house. That had been the summer when she had argued badly with Petunia, to the point that she believed they could never reconcile. Petunia had hated magic, but even she had written begging to be allowed into Hogwarts. She’d never forgiven Lily or Severus for finding that letter. So maybe that was it, rather than her being away for term times it was simply that Tobias wanted to cheer her up, so he had given her his old, well thumbed book. Though maybe that had been a part of the reason as well, that she’d come back from Hogwarts and the strain of a world so different from the one she had been born into, only to be rebuffed again and again by her sister. 

It bothered her that she couldn’t remember what university Severus had gone to. She felt like he must have gone to one. He was so clever and so talented. They had still been friends when they left Cokeworth Comprehensive, as far as her memories told her, though those memories were buckling under the strain of the new, reawakened memories. The only reason she could think of to explain him not having gone to university was that they hadn’t gone to Cokeworth Comprehensive. The wizarding world didn’t have universities, or at least she didn’t think it did. Maybe that was because they had been so young when they first started talking of Hogwarts, they couldn’t imagine a future beyond their secondary school. University was so adult, so beyond everything they could comprehend. But if they had lived in the real world, then it made no sense for Severus to have simply ceased to exist in her memories the way he did, not without a hint of where they had each parted to. She remembered her own life, her undergraduate studies blending into postgraduate research. The memories of going home for the holidays were vague though, and should have contained a reference to what university it was Severus too was away at. Once her parents died, the suddenness of the car crash wrenching them from her life, she had stopped going home. Petunia had dealt with the funeral arrangements and the house. That was probably the last time the two sisters ever met, which was desperately sad now Lily thought about it.

She roused herself, reaching once more into the box, feeling like Pandora. Her fingers found a sheet of paper, which as she withdrew had the word MUDBLOOD written clearly in capital letters. It was Severus’s writing. Different writing from the letters inviting them to Hogwarts, she realised. Handwriting changed, but the difference still jarred at her sense of reality. What a horrible thing to write, she thought. He’d been crying as he handed it to her, though, her mind provided the memory. Crying quietly, the tears spilling over and running down his face, his eyes almost begging something of her, though she had no idea what. She never had known.

It hadn’t been the first time he’d used that word, though. That was what he had called her, by the lake. It was a bad word, an insult, the worst thing he could possibly have chosen to say to her. She had been angry, hurt, had refused to speak to him until they were on the train heading away from Hogwarts, back to the normal world. She remembered that vividly, how she had slammed the door of the carriage open so hard that it had cracked. Magic had fixed that, so it didn’t matter. Severus had jumped, flinching away from her, hiding behind a book as he sat alone, reading. She’d stood there, glaring and waiting. He’d called her a mudblood again, only this time without the clinically calm anger that had coloured his voice at the lake, a desperate whisper as if he was pleading, pleading for his life or hers. She didn’t know. She didn’t need to know.

The scrap of paper had been the third and final time. Three was a magical number, so much happened in threes. Maiden, mother and crone. The three Nornes, past, present and future. Goldilocks. The Deathly Hallows. She had no idea why she had kept the note. It seemed like such an awful thing to keep as a memento of her youth. Handed over on the cobbled streets of Spinner’s End, grey clouds above them. Eileen had been watching, as if she had been trying to judge whether Lily understood. A whole family bound by secrets that they could never speak. Had Severus been trying to push her away, she wondered. She had thought so, and had held on regardless. She had been stubborn as a child. She was still stubborn. It was why she had so few friends. None of them really seemed to last, and none of them seemed worth the effort.

And yet, they had ceased to be friends somehow, had fallen out of contact and drifted apart. Somehow they had been torn asunder though she had fought against it so desperately. It was almost as if everything depended upon her holding on, and as if Severus was compelled to try to drive her away. Throughout everything, despite everything, she felt a tenderness for the boy that she remembered. A scruffy and awkward child who grew into a spiky and strange teenager, who grew into a lost and angry young man. She wondered what he had ended up as, if he was still at heart the same odd little boy full of dreams that she had first met, just as she was still the same hopeful little girl, buried beneath the cares and worries of an adult woman. 

Her memories seemed vague and conflicting, as if there were too many variations and too many options for what could be real, as if reality was optional for her. Unclear in the way that memories always were, when what she really needed was proof of some kind. A hard, concrete method to prove one way or the other what was true, even though she knew that magic couldn’t be real, the one disappointment that she had carried forward from childhood to adulthood. It would make sense were it a fairy tale, she thought, where first born children were promised to evil sorceresses and faerie queens by well intending parents who failed to think things through. But in a world of reality, where magic was just a pretty little story, albeit one that cropped up again and again in all kinds of texts, then there was no such thing.

She moved, shifting down to crawl beneath her bed after where her wand had rolled. Cautiously she touched it, afraid of the pain she had felt before, but it seemed almost warm. As if it was welcoming her back after a long absence. An old friend. She sat on her floor, holding it delicately. It felt as if it belonged in her hand, as if there was really magic inside of her. She looked at it closely, observing the carving on the wood. It seemed too intricate, too carefully done to have been the result of childish hands, no matter how astute and talented she and Severus might have been. The heat that seemed to emanate from within it too suggested that it was not just a simply stick, carved by children for a game. She hesitated, unsure.

Slowly, she stood. She searched through her memories. If magic was real, if she was a witch who had gone to Hogwarts, then she would be able to cast a spell. She felt as if the world about her was flexible, almost malleable to her thoughts, as if she could influence reality. As if she could chose to let the magical world fade back into childish memories and keep living her life as she had always done so. As if she could flick her wand and magic would be real, the memories of Hogwarts snapping into truth. As if she had the power to change everything.

She hesitated again, unsure what she should do. Severus, she thought, she would find Severus. Everything had started when they met, after all. The spell unfurled itself in her mind, the memories reawakened like a dragon whose slumber had finally been disturbed. Drawing the power within her together, she Apparated.


	2. Wolfsbane

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I feel like I should probably say sorry. So, sorry.)

The spell worked. Magic was real.

Lily reappeared in a darkened room. It was dingy and dirty, more a shack than anything else. Shadows flickered over rough wood as she sought to catch her breath, not wanting to lean against the wall behind her back. She had both expected the outcome and been taken completely by surprise. Half of her memories had held her grounded to the world without magic, dismissing it and the other memories as nothing more than childish fancy. The other half had fought back, wildly, insisting that it was real and that it was through magic that her memories had become overlaid. She had wanted to believe in magic, and yet she had not been able to believe fully without proof. Now she had it. 

She was not alone. She had let the magic guide her, no concrete location in her head except the questions of her past and wondering about Severus’s present. She could see a giant snake leaving out of the corner of her eye, slithering away. She paid it no heed, dismissing it as irrelevant. With her were two humans, which were far more important. One, a boy, who she barely glanced at. The other caught her attention entirely, all of her focus falling on him. It didn’t matter that it had been close to twenty years, she still recognised Severus in an instance. He was collapsing on the ground, blood gushing forth from a wound at his neck, his hands grasping but unable to stem the flow. 

She rushed to him, healing spells coming unbidden to her mind. The boy too followed her, both of them falling to their knees by him. He glanced between them, dark eyes showing uncertainty, confusion. As if there had been a seismic shift that he was simultaneously surprised by and had been expecting all along. Then silver strands started to ooze forth from him, and the boy scrabbled about to collect them, though through it all Severus kept his eyes fixed on hers. The blood slowed, and she took his bloodied hand in her own, not minding that she was getting blood on herself. She willed the bleeding to subside, for him not to bleed out in front of her as she watched hopeless. 

“Get a healer,” she hissed to the boy, not looking at him. He could wait, Severus could not. For a moment she thought Severus might speak, but she shushed him. She heard sounds of the boy leaving, hoping that he had done as she instructed. She was certain that Severus would survive, but she also knew that she wasn’t a healer. She would feel more confident with him under a professional’s care. She had only just found him again, she didn’t want to lose him a second time.

The giant snake came to her mind. That was undoubtedly the cause of the wound, she realised. The risk of poison suddenly occurred to her, then she dismissed it. She wasn’t an expert, but she did know a small amount about snakes. She didn’t know much about magic snakes but in some ways she didn’t think it really mattered. She had decided that the snake was not venomous. She felt confidence in her decision flow through her, just as she had felt the same decisive belief that magic was real. The same vague sensation that she could chose what elements came together to make up reality, as if the world was just putty in her hands.

As she concluded that Severus was at no risk of dying from poison, the slightly grey tone that had started to spread across his features faded away, almost as if his body had likewise considered being poisoned and then decided against it. She dismissed that possibility as impossible, firmly putting it down to the lack of light and the loss of blood. 

He tried to speak but she hushed him. She had hushed him many times before, she knew that. Times when he had tried to explain things that she didn’t want to hear. Times when she had been too busy to listen to him. Times when more than anything else she didn’t want to hear what he had to say just in case it would be the wrong thing. She didn’t want to hear his explanation, she didn’t want to risk him rejecting her or spouting harsh words to force her away. She didn’t want him to ruin everything that she was trying to fix, somehow. She felt that she could make everything right, that the power lay within her grasp. That she had more power than she should, that now that she had chosen her reality it was malleable within her hands. 

She didn’t want him to exert himself when he was injured.

He looked at her, such familiar dark eyes that she had known so well. It felt so foreign and yet it felt like coming home. As if she was stepping back into the life she should have had. Returning to the world and the life that had been stolen from her, the shattered pieces that had been buried deep within her slowly starting to come together, to fall into place. She thought for a moment that she could have spent eternity there, frozen in place remembering their days together as pupils at Hogwarts, their days together as children in Cokeworth. Always together, always those same dark eyes serving as a constant presence in her memories. Even in her other, faded and faked memories, he had been there as her best friend, a piece that didn’t really fit in with the life she had been led to believe that she had led. The clue that helped destroy the illusion. 

It seemed like an eternity, but eventually a healer did arrive. The blood flow had mostly stopped, the wound almost beginning to heal as if willed by Lily’s desperate thoughts, thoughts which had occasionally been occupied by wondering what the boy could be doing. Lily had gradually come to suspect that they were close to Hogwarts, the idea somehow just seeming to be right, even though she didn’t know exactly where they were. There was a healer at Hogwarts, or at least there had been when Lily had been a pupil there, though her memories of who that had been were still vague. There must still be one, and Lily couldn’t imagine what could be more important than an injury. What else was there that could possibly have delayed the boy or the healer? But a confused woman, who seemed more distracted by Lily than by Severus, finally arrived to do the job that Lily had no faith in managing properly. Lily ignored her, waving away her attempts at questions. How could she answer them when she didn’t even know the answers herself? She needed time to think, and she needed Severus to be alright. Then she would be able to think, and then she would know the answers. 

It now struck her that she had arrived just in time, that had she been a moment later he might well have died, alone, on the dirty floor. That his only companion would have been the boy, surely too young to witness death, and definitely too young to be capable of saving a life. Presumably a student of Hogwarts, who just happened to be there to witness whatever strange attack she had come at the end of. She couldn’t remember there ever being any snakes around Hogwarts when she had attended it, but she had also never ventured far into the Forbidden Forest, taking the hint provided by the name. She knew not everyone had been as obedient as her.

It felt worryingly like fate, as if the sudden urge to sort through her belongings that had led to her reawakened memories had been something more powerful than the idle thought she had initially assumed it to be. As if the whole world might have been altered by bowing to that strange desire. Her world and Severus’s definitely had been, as if the Earth itself had shifted and moved to accommodate them. To bring her to the place she had to be, so that she could seal the bloody gash.

As she let the healer do her work, standing back and staying out of the way, it occurred to Lily that she was dressed differently to Severus and the others. He was wearing a black robe. The healer and the boy had been wearing robes too, and Lily remembered that witches and wizards wore robes. She remembered that she had worn a plain black robe when she went to Hogwarts, just like all the other students. No colours, no details, no nothing. A strange uniform compared to the muggle world she had grown up in, the muggle world she had ended up living most of her life in. Robes, like the sorcerers and druids of myths and legends. The sort of thing that seemed like it came straight from two children, lost in fantasies of worlds that could never have existed, playing dress-up as well as make-believe. And yet that memory, of her and Severus in their black robes walking through the corridors of an ancient, magical castle seemed so clear, so much clearer than the memories she had assumed to be real that were now fading away.

She had thought she had a picture, of her and Severus in their Cokeworth Comprehensive uniforms, but that she had lost it. Maybe it had simply never existed, the memory of the uniform and the photograph merely inserted into her brain by whatever magical means it was that the real memories had been repressed, painted over by the fake memories that were now fading back into the pale imitations of the real life that she had actually led. Severus had never worn those drab grey trousers, just as she had never worn the plain grey skirt that was for girls. Neither of them had worn the thin, navy jumper with the school emblem embroidered on the left breast, neither of them had worn the ties in navy and maroon, those had not been their school colours. 

She wondered, suddenly, if it was only her and Severus who had never actually worn that uniform. She could remember seeing Petunia in it too, though maybe that too was a forgery and Petunia too belonged in dark black robes. It made more sense, for her to be the sister of a witch as well as a witch, that the three of them had all grown up together in Cokeworth and gone to Hogwarts. That that was why it was why she had drifted away from Petunia as well as Severus, because they had remained in the world she had forgotten about. Or maybe to had been something different. She had no memory of Petunia as a witch, but she no longer trusted her memory fully, accepting it as being full of holes, full of mistakes and fakes, full of options to be taken rather than the absolute truth. Memories were unreliable anyway, even if the ones that were untouched by magic. Those memories would still be touched by human fallibility.

She knew that she would stand out, amongst the robes, dressed in casual jeans and an old, pastel pink jumper, the kind of clothing that was appropriate for tidying and reawakening childhood memories. Not the kind of clothing that was really appropriate for exposing those newly found memories in public. Clothes that now had bloodstains on them, when she had only expected them to end up coated in a generous layer of dust. The real thing that she was intensely aware of was her socks. She had Apparated directly from within her own home, not really prepared for it to work. She hadn’t been wearing shoes, so now she stood outside in cheerful yellow socks that she imagined would not survive that kind of treatment. When the healer stood to take Severus to the Hospital Wing, Lily followed, conscious of her lack of footwear, feeling the uneven ground beneath her feet.

There seemed to be a silence hanging over the castle, over the grounds. A strange atmosphere that seemed so different from the school she had remembered, as if a seismic shift had happened while she was unaware. But Lily continued on, towards the Hospital Wing, leaving it all for later. Severus was the centrepiece of her memories, so that was what she would focus on. It was around him she would allow everything else to be reconstructed in her mind, as she was in no doubt that the explanation lay somewhere between the two of them. Hidden within her grasp. She just needed to find it, to understand it and allow it to become reality. She wondered, if people would remember her or if they might have forgotten her in the same way she had forgotten them. Severus seemed to remember her, though. Just as she had remembered him. As if it was between the two of them that all the answers lay. 

She stood in a Hospital Wing that was full of people of all ages, children and adults alike being treated for injuries that startled Lily. There she gathered the important information, murmurs of a battle and a war, the suggestion of victory. And a name that brought back a whole wave of memories, offering a depth of dimension to everything. Voldemort. Voldemort, whose cold eyes she could remember with a sudden clarity. Voldemort, whose dry voice she could hear offering her a bargain. Voldemort, whose presence had played such a great part in her teenage years. Voldemort, who was the source of it all, just as much as Severus was.

It was because of Voldemort that there were children lying there, injured as children should not be injured, along with adults who should not be injured either. And in amongst them, almost kept separate, was Severus. Injured and nearly brought to the brink of death because of Voldemort, she now believed without the hint of a doubt. He had always been connected with snakes, their presence winding around him and cascading forth from his being. And tangled up in that nest of snakes that she could never hope to penetrate was Severus, just as he always had been. Held as captivated by them as an adult as he had been as a teenager. 

With those thoughts came that shuddering realisation that there had been a war, before. That there still was a war, even if it seemed that she had arrived just in time to witness its ending. It made sense, now. The attack on Severus no accident, but an attempt at murder. There was something there, just outside the boundaries of her memory, that seemed to feel like there was a repetition, that it was a case of deja vu. As if that giant snake had not been the first fearsome monster to threaten Severus’s life against the backdrop of that miserable shack. But it was irrelevant, it was something she could worry about later. 

She knew that she should be helping, but she felt that it was not her place. That she had to figure out what had happened, to get it all straight in her mind before she fully participated in this reality. To solidify herself in connection to the world she had somehow allowed herself to be erased from. It all came back to Voldemort, she thought. She knew, realistically, that her memories were still too vague. She had managed to call up some, enough, for Severus, but she had none of the skills to help those that needed healing. So she faded into the background, waiting and thinking, her eyes always on Severus. Cleaning the blood from her clothes and hands with spells that she now remembered, the casting taking concentration as she searched back through her memories, trying to recall distant things she had learnt so long ago. Things she had lived unaware of for far longer than she had known of them, things that had been forgotten for longer than they had been remembered, now both fresh and distant. She considered and decided not to attempt to summon or transfigure herself shoes. It felt like something that should be left for later, once she had regained her confidence. She would, it just needed time. She cared more about the questions that drifted through her mind. 

She remembered all those stories, the fairytales and legends that she had loved. Tales of people making promises and being caught up in them. A father promising his firstborn child to a witch, who secreted the girl away to a life lived in a tower. The little mermaid, bound by the contract that gave her her legs and took away her voice. Of Rumpelstiltskin, who had helped a poor young girl who had promised him her firstborn child, who had then managed to outwit him when he came to claim his due. The magic that lay in words, innocently uttered without a thought. Words that captured and bound people long before they realised it. Words that held their power throughout every walk of life. The simple binding of two people in a marriage vow, a promise that could not be easily broken before the eyes of the law. The crafting of a spell, words and intentions combining together to create magic.

They’d won, that was the important thing, even if she wasn’t quite sure who they were yet. Her and Severus. Not Voldemort. The other details would fall into place. She would’ve continued to think about it, to worry away at the problems of what had happened, working her way to a conclusion, knowing that there was something missing. There was a gap in her understanding. A hole that existed in her logic, as if there was something she couldn’t quite remember. 

Severus was moving, or at least trying to. Attempting to gain her attention, and he had it instantly, but his attention wasn’t entirely on her. Distracted, his eyes looking past her. 

“He’s your son,” Severus said hoarsely, the words clearly a struggle. Lily pushed again at his chest, but to her relief he said no more, merely gesturing towards the door with slender fingers. She didn’t want him wasting his strength on trying to speak. It would only slow down the healing process. She was now entirely confident that he was in no danger of dying, the healer having done her job well. She was desperate to talk to him, to have him explain the gaps that existed in both her memories and her understanding of what had happened, but that could wait. 

She was an intelligent woman. In both lifetimes that was true. She had figured out how to remember her life as a witch. She could piece together the pieces that remained. Reality still felt soft, malleable, as if it was changing and shifting around her as her thoughts drifted between fact and fiction. She followed Severus’s gesture, feeble but sure. His gazed shifted from her to the doorway, accompanying his fingers. There stood the boy from earlier, the one she had seen in the Shack. The one she had instructed to get a healer.

He hovered there, as if uncertain if he should come in. She took in his appearance as she let her mind drift. A son, she remembered that now. She had had a son, a child she had sacrificed everything for. A little baby boy, who Voldemort had come to kill. A son who had survived, against the odds, and babies grew up into children and then adults, even when their mothers vanish from their lives. Everything seemed to come together, an explanation of sorts. Severus had been clever, but Voldemort had been so too. Severus knew the power of promises, the way they could bind you. He had been bound by them himself. She knew, almost vaguely, how he had extracted a promise from Voldemort to spare her, to spare her life.

But Voldemort had been just as clever, as knowledgeable of the power of magic. He’d tried to side step the issue by neither sparing her nor killing her. Taking her life away, not through death but through once again the intricate delicacy of a promise. And she had sacrificed her memories and the life she had had willingly, giving it up in the hopes of saving her son. Voldemort had believed himself to be cleverer than them both, but between them Lily and Severus had wrapped him up in a trap, even if that had not been quite either of their intentions. It had been moments of desperation, words and deeds done because they had little choice. Voldemort had promised Severus that he would spare Lily’s life, and so Voldemort had not killed her, seeing life as nothing more than that which came before death. Lily had promised to give up her life if it would spare her son, allowing her memories to be rewritten to remove her from the living as far as the wizarding world was concerned. But in that, Voldemort had taken her life, and so he broke his promise to Severus. Then he broke his promise to Lily by attempting to murder her son. A chain of promises, broken one by one. 

She had a son, she thought, sad that she had forgotten something so important. But sons have fathers, she remembered. She looked at him, and he looked at her. There was curiosity and uncertainty in his gaze, a lifetime of questions. He had green eyes, those were clearly a trait he had inherited from her. She put her mind to the question, it was important enough that Severus had felt the need to tell her, to ensure that she remembered her son. As if Severus feared the power she held, feared that she might forget something so important and that the bond between mother and son would be broken. He looked familiar, in a way that she couldn’t quite figure out. His eyes were hidden behind glasses, just like her father’s had been. Her father had had red hair like her though, that she remembered, just like her mother had been blonde like Petunia. Those memories were the same no matter which set she consulted. She had a picture of her whole family in her flat, though it was an old once. One which was missing her long lost son.

Her son had black hair, a wild mess. His features were sharp. There was intelligence in his gaze, and bravery in his stance. She glanced at Severus, his eyes once again returned to her face, watching her remembering her past. It had mattered enough to him that he strain himself, strain his voice to tell her, to make sure she didn’t risk forgetting forever the existence of her son. Harry, she remembered eventually, the name drawn forth from her subconscious. She looked again at him, at Harry. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that Severus cared about her, so he would want her to remember her son. At the same time she could conclude that Severus cared about her son too, wanted him to find his mother who he had grown up without.

Severus had never cared much for the state of his hair, not when there were more important things to worry about, washing it slightly erratically and never thinking to style it. Black hair, like her son. She wondered what kind of life her son had had, a life without a mother. Raised by his father. Loved by his father, looked after. It would not have been ideal, but better than being an orphan. She didn’t want that to have been his life. She refused to consider it, to consider anything else than him having had a happy childhood even if he had become embroiled in the war that had changed the course of her life. She rejected all other options. 

“Our son?” she asked Severus, the only conclusion she could draw out from her memories, the world and reality still feeling too fluid, as if anything could happen. As if the past could be rewritten if she was not careful. She hoped that she was right, that Harry was her and Severus’s son. Then he would have been raised by his father, her two boys would have had each other even if she had been torn out of their lives. For a moment she thought that Severus was going to say something, there was a frown on his face, a strained pain. It seemed as if he were in the process of drawing his strength, of finding the ability to force some words out, but whatever they might have been they were interrupted by Harry moving in to stand beside Severus’s bedside.

“Dad,” Harry said, relief clear on his face as he reached out to grasp Severus’s hand. Lily felt a wave of relief wash over her. She might have played no part in his life, but at least he had had Severus. Whatever it was that Severus had had on his mind seemed to fall away, the strained expressing changing to one of tender affection as he looked at their son. They had been happy, Lily knew for certain. They might have felt her absence as a gaping hole in their lives, but they had been a loving family even if it was just the two of them. Severus would have been a good father, she was certain of that. For a moment she just stood back and watched them, heartened by the way in which their bond was almost visible, love tying them together.

She was glad that Severus had been there to take care of their son. She was glad that after losing her Severus had had Harry to keep him going. It was a stroke of luck, that Severus had simply not been at home when Voldemort came to call. That was the logical assumption. He had murdered many people. It would have broken Severus’s heart to find Lily vanished, presumed dead, but had both Harry’s parents been there then the poor boy would have been an orphan. She wondered what would have happened to him then, maybe he would have been raised by Petunia. She would have to ask Severus about Petunia, her mind drawing a blank at what might have become of her sister. She wasn’t at Hogwarts, that she could tell. But an adult witch wouldn’t be. Or maybe Petunia wasn’t a witch. It didn’t really matter. 

Harry looked away from Severus to her, his gaze almost shy. She felt a shiver of pain, at the years she had missed. But she knew that Severus had been there for those years, and it was alright. He would tell her once he was finished healing. Harry too would fill her in on what she had missed. It was later than she wanted, but they had the future to become a family again. Maybe he saw his aunt regularly, though she remembered that Severus and Petunia had never really got on. Maybe things had changed with time and age, they had matured. Maybe things had changed without her, bonding over her loss. She liked the idea that Harry had a family that loved him.

“Mum?” Harry asked, a hint of tears in his eyes. Lily could feel some welling up in her own. She nodded, before wrapping him up in a hug. He was taller than her, almost fully grown. The last time she had held him he had been nothing but a baby, the difference between the two moments stark. Two hugs spread out across time, a chasm between them far greater than it should have been.

“You’re coming home with us, right?” he whispered into her hair, his words almost inaudible, as if he were afraid to ask. As if he were afraid that she would vanish again like she had before. Lily nodded, starting to cry. She didn’t know quite what the future held, just as she wasn’t entirely sure what the past had held. But she was going to meet her future with her family. With Severus and Harry.

She wondered where they had lived. She couldn’t remember that clearly. She didn’t need to, she was happy to wait to be shown. She didn’t want to make any more choices, didn’t want to make any more assumptions. The world seemed to be settling down, becoming fully solid, fully real. She was slotting back into it, smoothly. There might be rough edges, and maybe she had made mistaken assumptions, but that didn’t matter any more. They had probably moved from the house she had lost her life in. She couldn’t imagine that Severus would want to remain in it after that. She couldn’t imagine that he still lived in the house his parents had lived in, the run down house on Spinner’s End. She hoped that Tobias and Eileen were still alive, able to be grandparents to Harry with her own parents dead and her disappeared. She imagined that they were, old but able to lend a hand when Severus needed it. With magic, they could have lived anywhere, a nice little house where Harry would have had space to play outdoors.

Drawing back from the hug, she smiled at Severus through her tears, her head still resting on Harry’s shoulder. Severus smiled back, his wound healing already. It wouldn’t be long, she thought, before he would be back up and they could all go home. Rediscover themselves as the family they had once been. She’d move her stuff from her flat. She wasn’t sure what would happen, but they’d figure it all out. She was certain that finally they were all free.


End file.
